Indecent Liberties

INDECENT LIBERTIES

ADVANCE PRAISE:

"In Indecent Liberties, Robert Schmuhl wisely suggests that we remember the value of moderation. But, happily, he is immoderate when it comes to offering us intelligence, sharp insight, and independence of mind. At a time when so much commentary lives on polarization and exaggeration, Schmuhl is a national treasure. This book is a trove of some of his best thinking and writing." —E. J. Dionne, Jr., Syndicated Columnist, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of Why Americans Hate Politics and They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era

Other Notre Dame Press Titles by Robert Schmuhl

Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political Life in the Age of Personality

In a short, accessible and entertaining sequence of essays, Schmuhl ... deals with the interplay between politics and modern communication, between substance and image.—Chicago Tribune

Schmuhl writes in an interesting, entertaining style. His book needs to be read—especially by politicians. —Choice

Demanding Democracy

In Demanding Democracy, Robert Schmuhl examines the unparalleled interplay among citizens, political figures, and the media during the 1992 election year, arguing that a number of events resulted in the people reshaping political institutions and the media as they demanded a more proximate and participatory democracy.

INDECENT LIBERTIES

Robert Schmuhl

university of notre dame press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2000 by

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

http://undpress.nd.edu

E-ISBN:978-0-268-09296-2

This e-book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu.

To

Thomas J. Stritch

and

Max Lerner (1902–1992)

more than teachers

more than friends

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF EXCESS

THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA

AMERICA AND MULTICULTURALISM

ALLIES OR ENEMIES?

RUNNING SCARED

COPING WITH HYPERDEMOCRACY AND HYPERCOMMUNICATIONS

BEING PRESIDENT WHEN ANYTHING GOES

SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM AND A CENTER THAT HOLDS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WORKS CITED

INTRODUCTION

The central idea of this book—that Americans have a continuing penchant for going to extremes in ways that produce debatable, if not deplorable, consequences—first occurred to me in 1972. At the time I happened to be in graduate school (studying American literature and history). In addition, and probably more influential to my rumination then, I also worked as a journalist for newspapers and magazines. Whether I spent more time as a reporter than as a student is between me and God.

Covering the turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had witnessed racial violence in the streets—at one point almost being shot by a former high-school classmate who had become a police officer—and seen the upheaval on several college campuses. America was off kilter, anyone could observe, but the why of it all and the possible relationship to the past became a nagging concern.

Subsequently, while trying to combine academic and journalistic writing assignments, I kept confronting examples of this (for lack of another term) character trait in contemporary popular culture, political life, social thinking, and group activity. Several essays appearing in this book attempt to make sense of the recent past at the same time that they pursue the larger, unifying theme of going too far, of pushing thought or action beyond prudent limits.

To call the principal argument of this volume the wretched excess thesis (as one friend dubbed it) elevates what I’m doing to a theoretical status I find uncomfortably rarefied. As we see throughout academic life today, intellectual rigidity tends to sterilize theory, removing much of its value and meaning. It is true, however, that the notion of wretched excess—or what I refer to as the taking of indecent liberties—recurs so frequently in American life that it deserves sorting out and speculation on a sustained scale.

To be sure, you find intimations of this theme in other works. Thorstein Veblen’s first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), described—and satirized—the consequences of Gilded Age capitalism by focusing on conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption. To those who gain much, Veblen argues, there is what he rightly calls conspicuous waste, the showy spending for status. In 1954, at a time when Americanist scholars were probing distinctive traits of this country and its citizens, David M. Potter published People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. With acute perception and working in the zone where history and the behavioral sciences meet, Potter explored how wealth of various kinds—or in his recurring word abundance—influenced American life in many ways. For example, our notions of equality and democracy, in his view, are (to a considerable degree) shaped by the reality or potentiality of abundance.

It is possible to build on Potter’s analysis and argument to look more broadly at the subject of excess, the carrying of the existing abundance in whatever realm to extremes. Joseph Heller’s memorable portrayal of Milo Minderbinder in the novel Catch-22 is a savagely funny statement of the American Dream gone wild. Consummate plotter for profits and positions even in wartime, Minderbinder lampoons the make-a-buck-at-any-cost mentality that Heller finds dangerous. To corner the Egyptian cotton market to provide chocolate-covered cotton for the troops to eat is a ridiculous way of selling cotton candy. However, such antics earn for Milo the admiration of Americans and foreigners alike. Heller’s dark comedy draws into question the lengths to which a wheeler-and-dealer in a free enterprise system will go for the sake of more money and power. When soldiers die as a result of Minderbinder’s schemes, we all see the ironic hollowness of

Milo’s slogan: What’s good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country.

Heller’s criticism notwithstanding, some commentators on the United States will say the dynamism animating this country makes the possibility for overstepping previously set boundaries a natural consequence of a robustly free society. They are right, but it is necessary to add that contemporary forces (such as the rapidly expanding information technologies) accelerate circumstances to an extent that they often spin out of control, undercutting the original merit of an idea, cause, or action. Recognizing potential dangers is an initial step in attempting to avoid them.

From the outrageous hoaxes and nonstop hoopla of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and, later, his greatest show on earth in the nineteenth century to today’s most sophisticatedly produced Hollywood blockbuster extravaganza, excess is endemic in our popular culture. To celebrate the one hundredth birthday of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, seventy-five Elvis Presley look-alikes performed simultaneously on a New York stage. Given the circumstances and the symbolic power of the Statue, one such imitator might have been one too many.

Moreover, the hyping of events or spectacles to gain public attention now goes to such extraordinary lengths that our reaction is often ho-hum. Las Vegas has become an entire metropolis dedicated to excess to entice people into a desert to part with their money in every imaginable way (and a few unimaginable ones). Regardless of the sport, each athletic season seems to bring at least one game of the decade. Every other year, a battle of the century takes place. Although such manifestations of immoderation have a certain significance, I am more interested in examining larger forces or movements and their impact on the America we know—and the America of the twenty-first century. I worry that sensory overload will become desensitizing, with excess of whatever kind boringly commonplace.

In a Paris Review interview that was published fall 1969, E. B. White described the imbalance he perceived in contemporary literature, hinting at the consequences of this work:

A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world; he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge. Much writing today strikes me as deprecating, destructive, and angry. There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger. But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation. I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me. (p. 86)

American writers, of course, are not alone in lacking a sense of proportion. Mae West’s wisecrack—Too much of a good thing can be wonderful—describes this country’s conspicuous conspicuousness with a wry sagacity.

Interestingly, going to excess is not exclusively a one-way street to greater acquisitiveness, the outer limits of previously established boundaries, or a level of hype beyond a flamboyant producer’s over-heated imagination. Although much less frequently, in America you also have the other extreme, embodied, most notably, in the life and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau. In Walden, he famously urged: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. ... Simplify, simplify. Thoreau goes on to advocate a more refined sense of proportion, a call that is repeated in this volume with much less eloquence—and much less dramatic personal experience.

There are those who will say artists like Thoreau form the avant-garde in any culture and that they cultivate the extremes to produce new and distinctive work. This, of course, is true; however, the matter becomes more complicated when one lives as today in what has been frequently called a culture of excess. In an August 2, 1998 essay, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman observed, It’s rare to feel really shocked by anything in art now, shock having been the aim of so much of what’s on view for so long that it has become a cliche, which poses the obvious problem that cliches by their nature aren’t shocking. As art without limits can become chaos, so too in other areas a sense of individual and collective moral responsibility becomes vital. Otherwise there is the danger of always operating at or being exposed to the most extreme position in a constantly changing environment. What are the limits in an era without limits?

Much of the work on this volume took place—fittingly enough—amid the unfolding story of President Bill Clinton’s involvement with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and other charges of misconduct. When people inquired about work-in-progress and I mentioned the phrase indecent liberties, they invariably associated the president’s travail with the title. The comportment of the president, Congress, the Office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and the media led to such a conclusion. Geneva Overholser, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, pointed out on October 10, 1998, that many members of the House of Representatives who voted to keep sexually explicit material off the Internet favored release of every word of intimate information about the president’s extramarital behavior: When it comes to sex, lurching between extremes is what we do in America. We are a society torn between prurience and prudishness, libertinism and stern disapproval. Not that this lurching lands us somewhere in the middle. We just keep lurching.

The first and last essays of this book are new and attempt to provide a conceptual framework and conclusion for the other pieces that have appeared previously in somewhat different forms. In preparing the earlier efforts for inclusion here, I have not only recast certain sentences to clarify an idea or argument, to include relevant references, or to remove redundancies but also provided postscript statements concerning the essay’s original composition and, in most instances, additional reflections to update the subject from the perspective of the late 1990s. A few points, I confess, are repeated, but this is done deliberately for the sake of emphasis, continuity, and unity.

To a certain extent, some of the essays seem to be prose snapshots of a distinct time or contemporary circumstance. That, alas, is in the nature of writing about the here and now. But, for better or for worse, the larger point or argument of this book hovers over each page, providing either a haunting or a hypothetical unity. You, dear reader, can take your pick. 

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF EXCESS

To wander across America is to see (if not quite believe) what Gertrude Stein meant when she wrote:

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.

This is what makes America what it is.

This sense of space, of vast and varied territory, extends backward in time to the first encounters between Native Americans and European settlers. From the perspective of those who risked everything for a different existence elsewhere, their New World offered not only a fresh start but endless elbow-room. To be sure, wilderness abounded. A squirrel, someone later remarked, could jump tree-to-tree from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without touching the ground. But the freedom coming from more space worked with other freedoms the settlers were nurturing, and it had lasting consequence.

The ability to pick up and move elsewhere to begin life anew became an American prerogative. Geographical abundance whetted other appetites, which the closing of the frontier near the end of the nineteenth century did not suppress and which were vividly described (among other places) in tall tales, with their emphasis on superhuman traits and reality-defying grandeur. The wide-openness of the land that over time became the United States helped create a love of bigness in other aspects of life. As a young Theodore Roosevelt asserted in a Fourth of July speech in 1886 out in the Dakota Territory, ... like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else.

Roosevelt, however, went on to temper his pride with a warning that, in its way, continues to have resonance and meaning:

But we must keep steadily in mind that no people